The Enterprise RTLS Buyer's Guide.
A working playbook for enterprise teams scoping their first — or next — RTLS, RAIN RFID, or IIoT location programme. Written from two decades of delivery, not a vendor's marketing department.
- How to pick between UWB, BLE, RAIN RFID, GPS, LoRa & SLAM for your specific use case
- A vendor-neutral evaluation scorecard you can drop into your RFP
- The four ROI levers and how to model them with your numbers
- Programme governance: the gates that separate live rollouts from stalled pilots
- 15 common procurement traps and how to avoid them
Approx. 12,000 words · readable in 30 minutes · keepable as a procurement reference.
Eight chapters, written by people who have shipped this.
Use-case discovery
The seven questions every successful RTLS programme answers before the technology conversation starts.
Technology selection
UWB vs BLE vs RAIN RFID vs LoRa vs SLAM vs GPS. The decision tree, the trade-offs, the gotchas.
Vendor evaluation
A scoring template covering radio performance, software openness, integration footprint, TCO, and vendor stability.
The RFP
What to include, what to leave out. Sample evaluation criteria with weights.
ROI modelling
The four value drivers, how to quantify them, sensitivity analysis for the CFO conversation.
Programme governance
The four gates between scoping and live rollout. Who signs off on what.
Integration architecture
ISA-95 / Purdue alignment, MES / EMR / WMS plumbing, event schema, security to IEC 62443.
15 common traps
Procurement, technical, and commercial mistakes we've seen consistently — and how to sidestep them.